My favorite quote, in response to the fact that people are dying from diseases because they’re not getting vaccinations:
So let’s see… vaccines gave your son autism, of which he is now miraculously cured. And they also caused him to die for two minutes, but he’s now cured of being dead. I wonder if it’s possible that your son was never autistic or dead at all! At worst, the vaccines seem to cause mere temporary autism and death. Seems like a fair trade-off to prevent the more permanent forms of death.
“Group data indicated no statistically significant findings even though several parents reported improvement in their children” (from GFactor’s quote) - I read a report on the effect of sugar on children once. Apparently, most of the effects of sugar on children are of the self-fulfilling prophesy type - parents expect behaviour to tank, and no surprise, see their children’s behaviour as tanking when they have sugar. The human mind’s ability to see what it wants to see is not to be underestimated.
Ok, she’s bat-shit insane, we can get that out of the way first, but in some cases, a diet might help…my wife is a celiac, and she gets the gluten-free recipe magazines, one of which had an article on autism and gluten-free diets. My cousin, who has a child with Asperger, and she saw the magazine. So she borrowed and but the kid on a gluten-free diet and she claims it’s calmed him down. Shrug. Can’t **hurt, right?
Either way, she really ticked me off several years ago when she first became an advocate for autism awareness, telling the story about how she was in denial about it originally, and she got a day-care worker fired for daring to mention to her that precious widdle cuddlepants might have a disability.
I like how when she says that she’d rather her kid get the disease she sticks with the flu and the measles. What about, say, pertussis? Meningitis? Tetanus? Polio? Just how deadly of a disease is she willing to go for?
I also like, from this link:
that she also believes in the ‘Indigo child’ phenomenon:
Says Jenny: "There were so many times I would be sitting around with my son, Evan, and wish that I could join a ‘mommy and me’ group that loved talking about Indigos and Crystals. I always felt like there was no one around me who ‘got’ it.
Maybe they don’t ‘get it’ because it’s a bunch of complete bullshit!
15 children isn’t a whole lot, making this study pretty useless. It is theorized that autism is likely a number of different disorders presenting similarly, so if one of them is in fact influenced by gluten this study would only pick that up if one of the 15 is from that subset. I don’t necessarily buy the whole wheat-free/gluten-free craze (though I find it interesting that of the 11 “on the spectrum” kids I know, only 2 do not have any food allergies - but that’s at best anecdotal and I have seen no study proving a higher incidence rate of food allergies with autistic kids)
And I know that “it is theorized” doesn’t mean we know for sure that Autism is a collection of different disorders - but the one case where Us Dept H&HS stated that “childhood immunizations further aggravated the girl’s underlying mitochondrial disorder, which evolved in a condition “with features of autism spectrum disorder” seems very different from most other autism cases… http://medheadlines.com/2008/03/07/vaccine-autism-link-afterall/
My point being that if the Hypothesis you’re trying to prove is that Autistic kids as a whole don’t benefit from such diets you will pretty much always succeed yet prove nothing useful - even if you did the study on 1500 kids - unless you change your statistical analysis to show wether or nut such a diet benefits a sub-set of the 1500.
Both studies support this statement in the second one that I linked: “Current evidence for efficacy of these diets is poor.”
Yes. We can blame the lack of sufficient well-designed studies to draw *any *conclusions. But that’s the science we have. It doesn’t support the claims of the gfcf folks; nor does it strongly disprove them. The current evidence is poor.
The “medical community” could make a hell of a lot more money treating victims of vaccine-preventable diseases, but that logic is lost on McCarthy and her fellow conspiracy theorists.
And if vaccine manufacture was so profitable for “Big Pharma”, wonder why the number of U.S. firms making vaccines has declined so precipitously in recent decades, from 26 in 1967 to 12 in 2002, with five major childhood vaccines being made by only one company (not long ago there was a major shortage of flu vaccine in the U.S. because much of the supply was being imported from Britain, and when a plant there shut down a crisis developed).
Increasingly, I think it’s going to take major outbreaks of pediatric infectious diseases and publicity about deaths and serious injury from them, for people to stop listening to celebrity quacks like Jenny McCarthy and for confidence in vaccines to recover.
Cite from "The Cost of Giving Childhood Vaccinations: Differences Among Provider Types " PEDIATRICS Vol. 113 No. 6 June 2004, pp. 1582-1587
I believe that the cost of the actual vaccine is much, much higher (in the hundreds of dollars), but that’s a fixed cost from the vaccination company and docs don’t get a piece of it, to the best of my knowledge.
In the practices I’ve observed, I always got the impression that vaccinations didn’t pay well and were somewhat risky. If you underestimate how many vaccinations you will give in the season, and you have unused vaccines, you eat the cost of the extras. Also, if you lose power and they aren’t kept at the proper temperature, you lose out. This actually happened at a practice where I did one of my rotations. Even if you just lose ten vaccinations at ~$100 apiece = big loss. I picked low numbers deliberately there. I imagine the costs could be a lot higher in some situations.
Another paper I found, but didn’t cite, also factored in the cost of the well-child visit into the total cost. The well-child check up is reimbursed much more highly, as it should since it involves more work. I don’t know if I would count this - kids should be getting well-child checks up anyway.
Anyone who says “frickin’” (i.e. “there is no frickin way”) while giving an interview about a serious topic should immediately be told “and there is no **FUCKING **way we’re continuing with this bullshit” and be tossed out of the studio.
Sadly true. Perhaps part of the problem is that most people having children now don’t remember a time before vaccines, don’t remember polio outbreaks, and thus disbelieve that their kids might possibly be in any danger. It’s very sad. Herd immunity is a good thing.
Kind of…my university pays a group subscription fee that gives everyone access to some online journals.
I could probably e-mail you the pdf (I am all for fighting vaccination fears…these people drive me crazy). I would say PM me, but as a guest, I’m not sure if that would work or not.
If PMing doesn’t work, I’ll post one of my junk e-mails and we can work something out.
I’m gluten intolerant - maybe I have celiac - never been tested. But if I eat gluten, I can tell you that the gas, headaches and diarrhea make me - an adult - cranky. If a kid does have gluten issues, a gluten free diet probably will calm him down.
As to harm - its actually kind of a pain in the butt diet to maintain - and the casein free diet on top of that is really difficult. Especially for a kid - birthday cakes, most snacks at school, school lunches - all become impossible. And it can be hard to get the fiber and vitamins that you’d normally get in whole wheat breads and pastas. It can be done, but should probably be done for a kid with some serious thought on it. If it calms a kid down who is difficult to handle, the hassle is probably worth it.
